Belgrade Paramilitary
Project, done in collaboration with Paula Miklosevic, is an excerpt of
wider research on social (spatial) segregations along the lines of dress
codes, uses of language, comportment, and patterns of consumption. In
the context of the Urban Fog Of Belgrade, it analyses the blurring of:
1. the general tradition of military practices to camoufler, blind, veil,
or disguise an object in plain sight, in order to protect it by concealing;
2. the local histories of a decade of paramilitary troops parading in
camouflage in the city-space, not to be concealed, but to spread fear;
3. the sub-cultural uses of camouflage gear to voice dissent against bourgeois
notions of civic life, and fashion a kind of urban guerilla; 4. the local
popular and media addiction to whatever comes to be spotted as fashion
in clothing and self-styling, regardless of its context; 5. the readiness
of the local culture to become unconsciously militarized to a great extent,
and positioned in conflict to neighbors. The dress code in these images
is mostly undiscernable, as well as its relation to the very space in
which it is featured. It is as imprecisely articulated as the general
social situation.

Biography

Stevan Vukovic is a curator, writer and critic of contemporary art. He
is working on collaborative projects with artists, architects and social
scientists, developing concepts for a theory of spatio-analysis as a method
of interpreting libidinal circuits between the subjects and specific spatial
settings which they appropriate. Born in 1968 in Belgrade, he studied
philosophy and art history and received his BA in philosophy at the Philosophical
Faculty in Belgrade. He pursued postgraduate studies at Jan van Eyck Akademie
in Maastricht, Bauhaus Dessau, and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis.
He also won the "Lazar Trifunovic Award" for 'best art criticism'
published in YU in 1998.